The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted to be prior art against the present disclosure.
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) code can be used to encode data packets in wireless transmission. At a wireless receiver, when a wireless signal is received, the received signal can be decoded via a maximum likelihood decoding scheme implemented via an iterative decoding process. The more iterations the LDPC decoder employs, the better the decoding performance may be. However, the available decoding time for a codeword (CW) or a data packet is limited. For example, for a normal guard interval (GI) under the 802.11 standard, the decoding time for each symbol is 4 μs. For a short GI, the decoding time for each symbol is 3.6 μs. Thus, a tradeoff can exist between the decoding time and the decoding performance.
In the current systems, the iteration number of a LDPC decoder is determined using an average number based on empirical data. For example, an average number of iterations for a noisy CW received in the wireless signal is 5 iterations. Different signal quality may lead to different decoding performance. For a low-noise corrupted CW, a small number of decoding iterations can achieve successful decoding results; for a noisy CW, more iterations may be needed. Thus, using the same number of iterations for all received CWs can be inefficient for low-noise corrupted CWs, and inaccurate for high-noise corrupted CWs.